YIVO in the News & Staff Notes, November 2014

Letters to Afar

The YIVO/Museum of the City of New York installation, Letters to Afar, continues to receive long, thorough reviews, including “Péter Forgács’ Memory Art Brings Phantoms of Eastern Europe to Light,” by J. Hoberman in Tablet; “New film exhibit gives moving glimpse of pre-WWII Jewish Poland” in The Times of Israel; and “A Monument to the World Before the Holocaust,” by Anya Ulinich in The Jewish Daily Forward. (The last was also translated into Yiddish for the Yiddish Forverts.)

Other YIVO Projects & Public Programs

YIVO’s award of the 2014 Jan Karski Award to poet and essayist Piotr Matywiecki was announced on the website of the Jewish Historical Institute.

Among the prominent individuals in the Jewish world honored by the Forward in its annual “Forward 50” are two who have also been prominently associated with YIVO: Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, longtime YIVO scholar and associate, and now the curator of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews; and Henry Sapoznik, first director of the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of YIVO Sound Recordings, and now the director of the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

YIVO’s Sound Archive and music collections were also mentioned in an article in Jewish Currents by Jeremiah Lockwood, about Cantor Samuel Vigoda.

YIVO’s role as a resource for those who want to study Yiddish is mentioned in a long article about Jewish life in Poland by Jane Eisner in the Forward.

Excerpts from the YIVO/Schocken book Yiddish Folktales by Bina Weinreich can be heard on “Story Traveler,” on NCPR (North Country Public Radio).

Staff Notes

YIVO Director of Digital Initiatives Roberta Newman spoke about her recently published book Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals in Russia and America (Indiana University Press, co-author: Alice Nakhimovsky) in Houston at the Jewish Book and Arts Fair on November 2 and at the convention of the International Association of Yiddish Clubs in Boca Raton on November 16.

On November 30, 2014, YIVO Academic Advisor Edward Portnoy gave a talk on “Laughter is Healthy: The Yiddish Origins of Jewish Humor” at the Jewish Museum of Florida at Florida International University in Miami.